Sweetness and Light
by RobertSaysThis
Summary: In classrooms after the end of a world, children teach their adults how things can come back again. And under the ruins of a city made of sugar, the Doctor faces down her bitter foe. (This is the second in a series of stories about a different Thirteenth Doctor, who has the same face but who lives in a darker world.)
1. Chapter 1

Chess ran through the dark cavern corridor, clutching her adult's hand in hers. They'd been running from the sound for ages, but it still seemed to scream all around them, blaring out of the darkness in some horrible substitute for light.

"This was a mistake," said Chess's adult Ribs, his high voice clear even against the din. "It's not worth it, not even for this. Perhaps we could still get back, if we just ran."

"It's worth it," said Chess, not letting her fear come through. "What you've told me lies beyond the darkness, the voice that cuts right through it. Something that'll give us hope, remember? Something that's able to save us." It was silly, but at first she didn't realise she could see again, her senses all overwhelmed by the horror of the sound. Slowly her eyes adjusted to the dim light of the cavern, then quickly they adjusted to the sight of the pile of bones. It rose like vomit and bundled up into the air, but still they were nothing against that unthinkable thing.

Ribs shrank back and hugged Chess at her side. "We shouldn't have come here," he wept. "I shouldn't have made you leave."

"You didn't make me," said Chess softly. Ribs wouldn't remember – not with all the sugar – but they'd all had dreams in the past, before their city was eaten. Afterwards, it had been easy to set them all aside. But the conviction of her adult that some dreams were still worth having had reawoken something in her, a belief in possibility which no one on her world would ever have thought to call childish. It was foolish, thought Chess as she looked up the pile of bones, almost as silly as the thing that was seeping down towards her.

It looked so stupid, that thing. Chess felt like if she said that enough that it might go away, that the universe would admit a thing like that couldn't exist. Then, the world would make sense again. Then, she wouldn't have to die.

She'd heard rumours of the thing before her, of course. That there was a monster in the caves that would destroy you, if you tried to run away. But sometimes people escaped, they'd said. And she'd always known it'd never be her who died...

"We shouldn't have come," repeated her frightened adult. "And everything's all of our fault."

The thing slurped away from the stacked up pile of bones.

Far above the cave, a counter clicked two marks down.


	2. Chapter 2

There was a forest in the box, and it was not the forest outside it. It stretched under a blue sky as far as Chris could see, until everything was blotted out by a dense haze of trunks and green. It wasn't a forest you could enter, though— Chris gazed at it through the concrete slats that ringed round the TARDIS console room like bars.

"I don't like this," she said to the Doctor, who was bashing some wooden buttons with her fist. "I liked how your box was on the outside, all broken and smashed in. It reminded me of my school. But in here feels" – she searched for the right word – "a bit like a waiting room."

"Ha! Well, I suppose it is a waiting room," said the Doctor from her console all slatted with concrete and pine. "Where we wait 'till we reach somewhere unimaginably exciting. Your house, in this case."

"My house isn't exciting, Doctor."

"Seemed it to me. It had wi-fi. No wi-fi in here; gets eaten by the trees."

The Doctor had said she wasn't an adult, and Chris had believed her. But suddenly she seemed like a very adult alien indeed: telling her what she should find interesting in a boring room, while all around them lay a forest she wasn't allowed to play in. For the first time she seemed a bit like the wrong kind of doctor, and Chris felt slightly less sad about going home.

"Here we are!" said the Doctor as an ancient wheezing filled the room. "Your house, the present day." She bounded over to the TARDIS doors recessed behind Chris in the concrete. "Now, to make up for the bit where you've not had any adventures, you can have this." She produced a grimy square of paper from her pocket. "Psychic sick note. Give it to a teacher when you need a few days off; they'll accept it no questions asked."

"But you're a qualified doctor. You could just give me a real sick note."

"Can't do that. Wouldn't be ethical. Anyway, here we are!" She thrust open the doors. "Home sweet–" she paused. "Oh, hell."

Chris frowned.

"I say 'Oh, hell!' now," came the voice of the Doctor from beyond the doors. "It's sort of my thing. I used to say things like 'Fantastic!' or 'Geronimo!' to convey the vast wonder of the universe. But these days the universe has gone a bit wrong, so now I say 'Oh, hell!' instead."

"You shouldn't swear in front of a ten-year-old," said Chris. "My gran says it's irresponsible."

"Oh, it's the most responsible thing in the world, when I try to take you home and end up— here. Which is not home. Very not home."

Chris tried to adopt a neutral expression as she ran towards the doors, hoping the Doctor wouldn't notice she was excited. She burst out to see an unearthly sky, a vast expanse of blackness above a rocky plain. A cold breeze blew through the lifeless world, whipping uncomfortably against Chris's uncovered arms.

"This is space," said Chris. "Are we in the future? I suppose they had space in the past as well," she frowned, "but this all seems quite futurey to me."

"Yeah, it's the future," said the Doctor. "Or one of them, at any rate. But it shouldn't be here, not now. This should be your house back on Earth, not–" she snapped off a bit of a nearby rock and started to chew it "–the Great Plain of Ipsico9."

"You eat rocks?" said Chris, startled.

"Salt's a rock; so do you. But this–" the Doctor tossed a blue-grey crystal into Chris's hands "–it's just sugar. Bit treacly. Ipsico 9 was full of sugar creatures once; these rocks are some of their fossilised remains. Whole world runs on sugar, like your one does on oil. Demerara towers, bridges made from paradise. Bit of a paradise, all said and done. Except of course it's not," she sighed, "because it's all been destroyed."

She looked at the sugar-strung wasteland as Chris munched away on her rock.

"And of course it shouldn't be destroyed," said the Doctor said to the sky, "and it certainly shouldn't be here. This bit of space and time's in the wrong bit of–" she waved her hands "–the thing that space and time sits in."

"Are you sure it's not just your TARDIS?" said Chris. "It doesn't look like it's very new."

"It isn't! It's very, very old. But they can be brilliant, old things. No, you can have the best plane in the world – and the best pilot – but that's no help getting to America if New York switches places with–" she frowned "–Inverness."

"Does this mean I can't get home?" said Chris, excited and afraid. "Or that home never existed? Will we just be stuck here eating rocks forever?"

"Don't worry," said the Doctor, smiling. "I'm a genius; I can read a map even when the places all change. I'll just need to get some readings with this–" she pulled what looked like a spoon with a frowning face out of her pocket "–and I can septangulate the coordinates of the dimensional shift. Once that's done, we'll recalibrate the TARDIS, and get you home in time for buns and scones."

"I don't," said Chris, "really eat—"

"Well, you should! They're extremely unhealthy." The Doctor looked off into the distance. "I should be gone a few hours, so you'll have to keep yourself busy. There's some Harry Potter fan fiction in the console drawer that's mostly appropriate for someone your age—"

"You can't leave me alone in your house!" said Chris. "I'm a child. That's against the law."

The Doctor sighed. "Thing is, Chris, something's gone wrong here. There's been an apocalypse, and it shouldn't have happened. Out here isn't safe, but I'm not quite sure of how. It's not the sort of place to take a child."

"You might think that," said Chris, "but you don't get to make the law, even if you do live in a police box. I'll call the police on you, while I'm away. I'll tell my mother."

She stared upwards at the uncomfortable looking alien, who slumped her shoulders and sighed.

"Don't go out of my sight," said the Doctor in the end, "and no eating anything, okay? This place is murder on the teeth, and I'm a psychiatrist, not a dentist."

"It's okay," said Chris. "I didn't much like the rock. It tasted all burnt, like fudge that costs too much money."

"Great!" said the Doctor. "Good teeth, no dying. Perhaps there'll be some other ways–" she looked at her frowning spoon "–that this isn't a total disaster."


	3. Chapter 3

"Total disaster," Chris thought a little later, was a phrase that summed up well what had happened on Ipsico 9. After an hour or so they'd come across the ruins of a vast city, its buildings reduced to shards of hardened sugar. Chris had seen ruined cities on the news, but being inside one was a different thing— she saw doors and windows jutting out of the rubble, bringing home to her that people had once lived here. The Doctor had said this place used to be beautiful, but Chris now realised this didn't really matter. Her own house was ugly, but it still felt safe, and felt like home. Here, the safety of a million people had been stripped away, and now these ruins were all that their lives had left.

It didn't seem as if the Doctor had similar thoughts. In fact, Chris wasn't even sure that she'd noticed they'd come to some ruins. She was still staring intently at her spoon, going "Oh!" when the frown's intensity lifted and "Ah!" when it increased to a snarl.

"I don't like this place, Doctor," said Chris, hoping this would make her look up. The gambit worked; she turned away from her spoon to look round at the world beyond her.

"No, of course you don't," said the Doctor. "Who would? I always forget what it must be like, seeing something like this for the first time. Especially for someone as young as you."

She knelt down to Chris.

"Sometimes I look away," she said, "because I've seen the same things so many times, I can't bear to look at them all again. But," she sighed, "when you say the pain never goes away it's a disservice, because it is worse, seeing something like this when you never have before. Feeling it in your bones, that there are things like this in the world."

She stood up.

"I've spent a lot of time protecting myself," she said, "when I should be protecting you. You're right, Chris. This is an awful place."

They walked on quickly through the sugared ruins.

Unseen, shapes scuttled through the jagged scrap.


	4. Chapter 4

The Doctor still hadn't had much success with her spoon when they came across somewhere that people were still alive. Their village stood in a low bowl of land where the rubble had been cleared away, a clutch of cube-like houses made from hard squares of brown-black sugar. Chris looked at the size of the makeshift town compared to the vastness of the ruined city. Perhaps there were other survivors, and these weren't the only people left— but even then, it was clear how many of those who had lived here were now gone.

Nonetheless, there were still children in the ruins. She saw a young boy in ragged clothes running down the valley towards the town. Looking her way, the boy stopped, and cautiously he walked to the Doctor and Chris's side. Chris would soon realise that everyone in the town was black, but that no one ever noticed that she and the Doctor weren't: it just didn't seem interesting to them, in the way you'd forget the colour of your best friend's eyes. Certainly, the boy treated her as if she was the most unremarkable person on the world.

"Want a transfer, do you?" he said to Chris. "School's full, I'm afraid. I don't care how talented your adult is–" he nodded at the Doctor "–we're not accepting alien pupils at the minute." He leaned in to Chris. "No matter how rich their family are."

"The Doctor's not an adult," said Chris, noticing the sad look in her friend's eye. "And I'm not an alien. I'm a human, from the planet Earth, and the Doctor's a, uh, something, from–" she trailed off "–somewhere else."

"Somewhere else?" said the boy, suddenly alert. "Did you come from the caves? Did you get past the monster?"

"No," frowned Chris. "We're not here about any monster. We're here to–"

"What my friend Chris means to say," said the Doctor, speaking over her, "is that we're absolutely here about the monster. We're, uh, studying monsters. At the university. And, as it happens, to pass our course in advanced… monsters, what we really need is to help a planet or two to get rid of whatever it is they've got just monstering around."

"That's not what I meant to say at all," said Chris.

"Our monster won't be like what you're used to," said the boy in a dark voice. "It's not all tentacles and eyes. It's made–" he gulped "–out of sweets."

"That doesn't sound scary at all," said Chris, glancing at the Doctor to agree. But the Doctor's eyes were elsewhere, and they were hard as she looked at the shattered spires of sugar, the melted ruins of buildings that might have once been liquorice. She was thinking that for the people who lived in a place like this, sweets might just be the scariest things in the world.


	5. Chapter 5

The boy – whose name turned out to be Lip – led them to a building that seemed slightly less squat than the others in the valley. Inside were lots of other children, huddled round desks and ancient-looking computers.

"Here we are," said Lip. "The ruling council. We're in command of most everyone who's left in the city, though there aren't so many of us these days."

"Are all the adults dead?" said Chris. "Where I'm from they'd be ruling everything, especially if it was as broken as it is here."

"Adults ruling things!" laughed Lip. "Don't be silly. They'd just sit around eating sweets all day. No, they're not dead, they're just all still at school. A lot of them are missing, though, children and their adults. Always together, always in pairs. Our population counter's clicked down more times than I could count. And we think it all has something to do with this person."

Before Chris could respond, Lip twiddled the dials on a nearby television and bought it loudly to life. It fizzed and spat static as its distorted image turned on, before Chris's questions were forgotten in the face of what it revealed.

"The caves below the city were popular before things went all wrong," Lip said. "People would go down there to look at all the rocks; gasp at the shapes that sugar could get itself into. Some of the security cameras still work, in the larger caverns. And one of them showed us this."

The screen showed a figure that was almost human in shape, but built entirely out of multicoloured sweets. Its yellow stomach was thick with sugared sweat, and its cylinder limbs were slouched into a bent slump. It had spiral eyes and a metal moustache, but somehow still looked more sad than ridiculous. And it was sitting on a giant pile of bones.

Through the blur of the recording, the three people watched as the figure picked up and ate one of the nearest bones, a crunching noise coming from the black circle of his mouth.

"Good God!" said the Doctor. "It's the Kandyman!"

"You know the monster?!" said Lip, astonished.

"'Know' is a grand word. I've met him. Long time ago, in a place that crops up in most of the futures. He died, as much as a robot made of sugar can. But sometimes it's the most unlikely things that end up coming back."

Chris frowned. "Why would a man made of candy spend all his time eating bones?"

"Same reason a girl full of bones spends all her time eating candy. Needs a food source, isn't fussed about its origin. Knowing what I do about the man who invented him, I wouldn't be surprised if they made sure he'd find bones tasty."

"He's invented?" said Lip. "We thought he just lived down there. Everything native to this planet's made out of sugar, so why wouldn't it have a man made of candy?"

"Good logic," said the Doctor, "but he's not from here. He was built by an insane man for an awful dictator; he existed to kill his victims in all these inventive ways. Poisoned by sweets, bayoneted by candy canes. Grim sort of place, it was. They killed you if you weren't happy."

"That sounds a bit silly," said Lip.

"It was very silly! But dictatorships often are, from the outside. Pointless acts and meaningless rules, but the stupidest laws can mean everything, when your life's on the line when you break them. It can't be fun, in this ruined city. But I'd take this place any day over the one where the Kandyman's from."

"That's horrible," said Lip. "But then, I suppose horrible's a good thing, if you want a high grade in your monster hunting degree."

"The Doctor was lying about that," said Chris, before her companion could respond. "We're not from a university at all, and we didn't come to fight any monsters. We're only here because the universe went wrong."

"Ah," said the Doctor. "Well. Lying's not quite the word I'd use. I thought if I gave you a reason why I'd check out the thing in your cave then you wouldn't ask too many questions; you'd just let me go and beat it. But the truth is there's no reason why I've come to beat it, not really. I'll stop monsters wherever I am, even if I was only there in the first place to buy some shelves." She looked at Chris. "Fighting monsters. It's kind of what I do. Should have said that; didn't. I'm sorry."

"But the universe is still all wrong!" cried Chris. "You said this is supposed to be my house, and it's all made of sugar instead. Shouldn't we be thinking about that, and not about beating a monster?"

"I can think about two things," said the Doctor. "I'm very clever." She smiled. "The caves are a long way beneath this city. I reckon I can get a good reading on what's wrong with the future if I go down to search for the Kandyman–"

"–you want to go alone?" said Lip, looking concerned.

"Of course not!" said Chris. "I'll be coming, too."

"Chris won't be coming too," said the Doctor. "It was dangerous enough bringing her to the city, let alone to the lair of a mad machine. She can stay up here, where it's maybe a fraction more safe."

"It's just that you're an adult," said Lip, looking awkward. "I don't know that it's very responsible of me, letting you go down to the caves by yourself."

"I'm not an adult!" protested the Doctor. "I'm over two thousand years old!"

"I'm sure you are," said Lip, rolling his eyes. He turned to Chris. "I'd like to accompany the Doctor down the caves, if you're happy putting her in my care. I know we've just met, but I've had a lot of experience keeping adults safe— it's one of the reasons why I'm in charge now. I promise you she'll come to no harm under my supervision."

"Hm," said Chris. "I'm not happy about going to the future if it just means sitting around in this room all day. If the Doctor's making herself useful, then I want to do something too."

"There is one thing," said Lip. "Whatever's causing people to take their adults down to the caves— we think the adults are talking about it, but they won't tell us children why. You could spy for us; go undercover. You could say you're a Normingman, from Ipsico 1: they look like human children until the day they die. You could go to school right now; pretend you're here on transfer. There's no reason the adults wouldn't believe you."

"It would be simpler for the Doctor to go to school," said Chris. Everyone would obviously think she was an adult."

"That's true," said the Doctor, "but they'd make me sit down all day. There'd be no chance to wander around and work out what's caused the future to break. And as I said, it's not save in the caves! I doubt you've faced any robots made of sweets before, but the Kandyman's the worst of them all. He's like–" she whispered "–the Mechagodzilla of candy!"

"I don't know what a Mechagodzilla is," said Chris.

"In any case," said Lip, "I think the Doctor's right. With you vouching for her I'm prepared to believe she isn't an adult, and even if you're both lying she'll be under firm child supervision. We'll have an adventure, you'll go off to school."

"School's an adventure of its own, in a way!" said the Doctor, who didn't have to go.

Chris sighed. She had imagined a trip with the Doctor would involve exciting things, like fighting alien knights or scaling a living pyramid. Instead, she would be doing the same things she did every day, but in a slightly more ruined location.

She bit her lip, and started getting ready for school.


	6. Chapter 6

It was hard to tell the time of day on Ipsico 9: the sky was always dark, and there was never any sun. Nonetheless, Chris discovered she had arrived in the makeshift town not too long before the school day was due to start. She arrived slightly late to the long, low building where school was taught, being ushered into a room full of adults sat behind tough sugar desks. None of them looked up as she entered, the teacher explaining that they'd decided to take on another alien adult, and the class weren't to do what they'd all done last time. Then lessons began, without so much as an aside to Chris as to what they might all be about.

It wasn't much clearer what the lessons were about after they actually began. Chris knew she was an intelligent girl; she'd been told as much by frustrated people more often than she could remember. But there were still limits to what she could do, and the formulas and equations the teacher scribbled on the board would have been beyond even a maths professor from her time. It was clear they were beyond the teacher, too; she was obviously nervous as she read out of her giant and yellowing textbook. In Chris's class back home the pupils would have sensed that fear as a weakness, pouncing on the teacher as they ripped her lesson plan to bits. But this teacher was a child and her class all adults, and there was silence as the crowded room scribbled away.

Several confusing pages of the textbook passed before a buzzing sound indicated it was time for toilet break. Almost all the adults started chatting to each other, looking past Chris as if trying not to notice her. Only one thin man seemed to realise she existed. He looked awkwardly at her, then came over to shake her hand.

"Chris, is it?" said the man. "I'm Angles, and welcome to Ipsico 9!" He waved his hand to indicate his retreating classmates. "Sorry about this lot. They're a bit prejudiced against aliens. Last one we had needed to leave, the bullying got so bad. Everyone kept calling her Four-Eyes."

"Because she had four eyes?"

"No eyes. But two sets of glasses." He frowned. "But I think they'll treat you better than her. You look so much like a child that they'll think of you as an authority figure, even though they know you're not."

"It's funny," said Chris. "Where I'm from, the adults are in charge and the children who go to school. I'd never thought of it happening any other way."

"Gosh," said Angles. "I didn't know that about Ipsico 1! Truth is, it used to be like that here – adults like yours truly running everything – but I think we made a bit of a mess of it all, in the end."

He paused as something suddenly occurred to him.

"How much do they tell you about what happened here, over where you're from?" he said.

"We tend to focus on ourselves," said Chris, being careful not to lie. "We know things happen in other places, but we don't ever spend much time actually thinking about them."

"I see," said Angles. "Well, you'll only have spoken to children, up until now. And they wouldn't have told you the whole truth. See, there are things that only us adults know–"

"Oh, I know all about those," said Chris. "What happens is that two grown-ups get into a bed, and then–"

"No, not those," said Angles. "Things about Ipsico 9. I thought they'd be on the news, throughout the system. But perhaps we were just hoping that other people would care."

He looked into Chris's eyes.

"What happened was–"

But before Angles could say anything more, a horrible sound told them the break was over, and the teacher shouted for the adults who'd spent too long in the loos. Whatever Angles had to say would have to wait, and Chris's mind swam with questions as the class turned to the boring book once again.


	7. Chapter 7

In a dark, rocky corridor far below the ruined city, Lip was looking in astonishment at the Doctor's torch.

"Run it by me again," he said. "You're saying it's made of animals?"

The Doctor sighed. "Not exactly. From little creatures in the sea, a very long time ago. They died, got crushed, got sucked out millions of years later when they'd all turned into a whole lot of big black goop. But it's a goop you can make all sorts of things with." She waggled her plastic torch. "Even this."

"Hm," said Lip.

"You don't seem convinced," said the Doctor.

"A magic black sludge all made out of animals," said Lip, "that you can use to make anything at all. It sounds like the sort of thing the adults would read to us from books, before they ate the city. They said it was important we heard fairy tales like that; that they would teach us things. But I'm not sure they taught me anything at all."

He kicked a lump of sugared rock hard with the front of his foot, and noise echoed through the corridor as it bounced its way down.

"Hang on," said the Doctor after a while. "They ate the city? That they lived in? Because it was made out of sweets?"

"At first it was just bits and pieces," said Lip. "The libraries, and then the parks. We asked them where we'd read or play, but they just said things would work out in the end. And they said we'd understand once we were adults, but I thought we wouldn't really. There wouldn't be any parks left, you know? It's not like we could eat them again."

The Doctor hadn't been lying when she said she could do two things at once. Perhaps anyone else on Ipsico 9 couldn't have kept listening to Lip so intently, while at the same time noting the click of insect legs that came from the darkness below. But she said nothing about anything she'd heard: all she did was gently swap the spoon in her torch-free hand with her gently humming sonic screwdriver.

"Most of us were at school when it happened," said Lip. "We saw our teachers start to gnaw at the walls and blackboards, but we thought they'd all just gone mad with stress— it's a difficult job, being a teacher; you know that 'cause you're so busy making it hard for them. But we soon realised it was all the adults, just eating and eating like they'd never tasted sugar before. And of course we asked them to stop; begged them. But they all just ate and ate, until all of the city was gone."

"What happened to them, Lip?" said the Doctor as the insectile noise grew larger. "Where did all the adults go?"

"Most passed out, in the end, from so much sugar. And most of them never woke up. But whether they were living or dead, in that sort of state there's no way they could escape–"

He grew pale.

"The Chox. Them." He pointed at the forms emerging from the corridor, their giant insect legs connecting to squarish chocolate bodies. Three came out of the darkness, and more stared up behind them. Their red eyes all gleamed upwards, sensing prey.

"Oh hell," breathed the Doctor, thinking it had been a good catchphrase to choose.


	8. Chapter 8

For lunch most of the adults went back to their children's homes, getting as far away from the school as they could. But Angles didn't have a home as such— he was one of the few adults who hadn't been assigned a child, and was looked after in a large building instead. As a result he had nowhere he wanted to go that lunchtime, and he sat by the school wall with Chris as they munched down their sugar sandwiches.

"The thing you have to understand," he was saying, "is that all us adults felt bad about what we'd done to the city. When we came to, the few kids who'd survived were furious at the few of us who'd survived, and we found it hard to think of a reason why they shouldn't be. Why shouldn't they be in charge, after all? It wasn't them that made such a mess of things. So now we learn, us adults. The things we need to know, so we can rebuild the city. I mean, I was a commodities broker before everything got eaten! I don't know the first thing about how to get things going again."

A loud hum blared out of the school, which could be heard through the makeshift village. The adults coming back from their houses started to run, afraid they wouldn't make it before afternoon lessons began.

"What I don't think the children realise," Angles said, "is that the lessons aren't enough. Right enough, we'll learn what we need to know to get the city running again. But the day we manage that— well, it's still a very long way away."

They started to walk towards an emerging line of adults, queuing up ready to file into school.

"We had a saying back before we ate the city. That a person needs sugar, or a person needs hope. Sweetness and light. You can't live without them both." He laughed through his rotten teeth. "And we've all had our share of sweetness by now! So we found something that gives us hope, us adults. Something precious and something secret. And I'll tell you all about it–" he smiled "–as soon as we've finished school."


	9. Chapter 9

"They eat people," Lip was saying as the chocolate insects advanced. "Adults used to say we had the self-control of a Chox, when we ate too many sweets. But they don't tend to say that any more."

He drew a small blowtorch out of his pocket as the Chox advanced, turning it on with a click. A blue flame spat out of the front, looking pathetically inadequate against the giant advancing monsters.

"Stay back," said Lip. "I'm your responsible child. Fighting monsters isn't something an adult should ever have to do. You wouldn't know how to handle yourself."

The Doctor scowled. "Thing is. I hear that sort of thing a lot now. That because I'm… an adult, then I won't know how to fight. That I'm just someone to be saved. And the thing you have to remember is–"

She whipped out her sonic screwdriver and aimed it at the nearest Chox.

"–I'm the Doctor. And I can bloody well take care of myself."

A blast of visible sound bellowed out of her sonic device, hitting the creature's heart at the exact frequency needed to send it into overdrive. The creature shivered and let out a hideous groan, then exploded into a mess of something you could almost pretend was fondant.

Lip looked at the Doctor in awe.

"Yeah, you can take care of yourself," he said. He grimaced. "Let's do this thing."

He leapt onto the nearest monster, landing on the flat top of its chocolate shell, then thrust his blowtorch downwards and started to melt his way in.

What followed passed in a blur like a sugar rush. Lip cut his way through monster after monster with his weapon, melting their legs off or boiling his way through their shells. As he did so, the Doctor flicked her device through multiple settings, breaking apart each Chox in a different way. One was frozen and shattered apart with a kick; another developed diabetes and was killed by the sugar in its own body. When Lip thought there was nothing left to do he turned round to see the Doctor dispatching the final Chox, stabbing it repeatedly with her screwdriver in a not especially technical way. With the threat gone, she turned to Lip and smiled, a bit of monster shell held in her outstretched hand.

"Chocolate?" she said.

"Thanks," said Lip, "but I'm a vegetarian."

They picked their way past the devastation and continued on into the gloom.


	10. Chapter 10

The afternoon's lessons were somehow worse than the morning's. The teacher explained the latest sugar mining techniques as the classroom scribbled away, and Chris grew frustrated as she failed to understand a thing. It wasn't just her, she now realised. She could see confusion flit across the faces of all the adults around her, and she knew their child teacher would be unable to answer the many questions they had. For the first time, she understood the survivors' project was doomed— they would never be able to learn enough to remake their city. And if she'd worked that out in a day, the adults certainly would have in however long it was they'd been learning here: it was small wonder they needed something to give them hope.

It was curiosity about what that something was that got Chris through the rest of the day. When the sound finally hummed to tell everyone they could go home, she held back with Angles outside the school as the other adults dwindled away. Eventually, Angles led her outside the valley where the town lay, making sure as he went that nobody was watching them. It suddenly occurred to Chris that she was a child completely alone with a stranger, and that there were threats in time and space that had nothing to do with aliens.

"I think we should go back," said Chris. "The Doctor said that where there's life, there's hope, and there's lots of life back there in your makeshift town. I don't need to see whatever it is we're going to."

"Nonsense!" said Angles. "What's down here is much better than anything in this crumbling old ruin!" Before them a massive hole broke the rubble like a gash, stretching its way down into total blackness.

"But there's something down in the caves," said Chris, now very afraid. "A candied man, on a pile of bones. Who eats people, like the ones who've all gone missing."

"Is that what the other children told you?" said Angles. "They do let their imaginations run away with them sometimes. A man made of sweets living underneath the city! That's absurd. But then, I suppose it's not the silliest thing they believe."

Chris had realised something, and her blood ran cold.

"The other children?" she said. "But I'm–"

"An adult? From Ipsico 1? I'm not an idiot, Chris. That place is rich; it's got brilliant schools. No one in their right mind from One would send an adult here to learn. No, you're a child, and you're a spy. You've been sent here to find out what us adults know." He smiled an awful smile. "And now you're about to find out."

He grabbed onto Chris's body and lifted her off the ground, holding tightly against his chest. Chris screamed and kicked as they went into the cave, but Angles was very strong, and the town now seemed to be very far away.


	11. Chapter 11

The Doctor was frowning at her spoon, and the spoon was frowning at the Doctor.

"This doesn't make a lot of sense," she said. She scowled and whacked the spoon off the cavern wall, then scowled again when that failed to make any difference.

"What's wrong?" said Lip, half listening, his senses turned towards hearing more chocolate insects.

"Something's distorting the reading, like there's lots of places here all at once," she said. "I can see that time's all twisted, that nothing's now quite as it should be. But there's something else; a mess on top of a mess. Like an ugly wig on a hideous man."

She thrust her spoon out ahead of her. "It's getting stronger the further down we go. In fact, I think the source of it might actually be just here."

They stumbled out into a large cavern, and whipped their torches round the space. At the centre of the space was a pile of bones, and at the top of the bones was a candied man.

"Ah," said the Doctor.

The Kandyman turned towards them both, his spiral eyes picked out in the torchlight. He dropped the bone he was holding, and chuckled in his curious way. As he did so, there was a burst of hideous sound and light, which both throbbed their way around his curious face.

"Visitors!" he said in his strange, high voice. "You've come to my lair, I see. I hope you haven't come expecting laughter. I'm afraid I'm not so jolly anymore."

"You're a killer," said the Doctor softly. "Innocent people have died because of you, and I'm not sure I'm able to let you live."

The Kandyman just laughed in response. "I am!" he said. "I don't deny it. There's no twist in the tale, no punchline. I'm just a monster, and I'm so alone–"

"Oh God," muttered the Doctor, "he's gone depressed."

"I'd be depressed as well," said Lip. "Made out of candy, stuck in a cave all day. And with a voice like that. I thought he'd have a scarier voice."

"It's a terrible voice," moaned the Kandyman. "An awful sound for an awful man."

"Caught up with you, has it?" said the Doctor. "The executions with sweets, and your delight in them? I didn't think your maker would have put guilt into you, but I was wrong. It's all through your being, like a stick of rock."

"Executions?" said the Kandyman. "But I've never executed anyone."

"Yes you have! That's what you do! You can't go round as a toaster and claim you've never seen any bread before!"

"You must be thinking of someone else," said the Kandyman in his sing-song voice.

"Oh, yeah, one of the other candy robots blasting about the universe," said the Doctor. "I'll just get out the list. Or I won't, because there's only one Kandyman. Built by an insane genius, and made to kill."

"Um," said Lip.

"Not now, Lip," said the Doctor.

"It's just–" Lip trailed off. "If there's only one Kandyman," he said at last, "then what's that over there?"

The Doctor followed Lip's gaze to the side of the cavern, where the shattered candy shell of a robot lay. Its entire lower half was gone, and its body was blistered brown where the heat had ripped it in two. But it was clearly the remains of something that looked exactly like the thing before them now, sitting confused on the top of a pile of bones. Silently, the Doctor looked round more of the cavern. There were bones everywhere, in great piles that covered the ground. But there were also bits and pieces of things that had clearly once been Kandymen, colourfully standing out from the human remains.

"I've just realised something important about the man who made the Kandyman," said the Doctor.

"That he was insane?" said Lip.

"Not that! Place he lived, he'd be insane not to be. No, he was working for a dictator. And when you do that you have to show you're indispensable, prove you're too valuable to make an example of. So you embellish things – make out you've done more than you have – like you're in the world's deadliest job interview. And you say you invented a whole new robot, when what you've really done is just taken one off the shelf–" she sighed "–and turned him into an executioner. He'd have made up a cover story, of course. He'd have even believed it, in the end. Believed he'd built a whole man out of sweets, when all he'd really done was turn himself and a robot mad."

"The Kandymen worked deep below the ground, in the factories," said the robot who had never been an executioner, "there's no reason anyone in charge would have needed to know about us. The Dictator's lot weren't much interested in what happened down there, so long as happiness prevailed. If one of my kind had been taken to the surface, repurposed, then it's possible no one would have known there were many Kandymen— especially when you'd risk your death by mentioning it."

"That's as maybe," said Lip, "but you still said you were a monster, and you're sitting on a pile of my people's bones. I don't much care if you did or didn't kill on a distant planet if you're here right now and eating all my friends."

"Your friends?" said the Kandyman. "But these were my friends. And it's my fault they're gone; it's my fault they're dead. We worked in a balloon factory, making gifts. People always looked so happy, when someone gave them a balloon!"

"Because they'd be killed if they did anything else," said the Doctor.

"It wasn't such a bad place to work," continued the Kandyman, ignoring her, "but the actions of the regime weighed heavily on us all. One day in the depths of the factory I found a— a sort of rip, I suppose, all swirled and multicoloured like a lollipop. It whispered to me, about a world on the other side: a place made of sugar, where a man made of sweets could live. Where us workers wouldn't just pretend we were happy."

He looked down at the yellowing bones. Tears were streaming from his eyes, now, making him even stickier than he had already been.

"I told them in secret, the whole of the factory. My friends and colleagues; people of all ages. And one night when we got the chance we just ran through that rip, before anyone in charge could have stopped us. And I thought we'd end up in paradise, but instead–"

"–the journey killed everyone," finished the Doctor. Stripped the people of their flesh; burned the robots down to bits. Now you're the only survivor." Her eyes were dim. "And that's a terrible thing to be."

"I've been here so long," the Kandyman wept. "Eating the remains of people who I loved. I'd never have thought I'd have sunk this far; I didn't think I'd do so much to survive. But I want to live, so much more than I thought I would. Even like this, alone in a cave and stuck on these bones. So I am a monster, in the end, even if I haven't done anything to the living. I can be sad, though!" He laughed through his choking tears. "At least down here, I'm allowed to be sad."

"Oh, Kandyman," said the Doctor. "Mate. It's not–" she mulled her words. "People who don't know, who've not been put in that position. Where you have to choose to die, or do something you never thought you would. They can judge you, think they'd never do the same, if they were put in your candy shoes. But the fact is they don't know, and not knowing's a privilege in its way. You've done awful things to survive, but you've never actually hurt anyone. And I don't think someone can call you a monster, when they don't know what being desperate's really like."

"And do you know what that's like?" said the Kandyman, turning to look at her. "Doctor?"

"Yes," said the Doctor. "Yes, I do."

"Um," said Lip again.

"Having a moment here, Lip," said the Doctor. "Me and my candy friend."

"Yeah, I know," said Lip. "But we came down here in the first place because loads of people had gone missing, and we've no idea if he's telling the truth. I don't really care what his story is if he's been eating the bones of my friends."

"Missing?" said the Kandyman. "I wouldn't know about that. You're the first people I've seen since I ended up in this place."

"You would say that, though," said Lip.

"He would," agreed the Doctor. "But he's telling the truth. His legs are all smashed in, see? He can't move. Unless all those missing people climbed up the bone pile and let him munch away, there isn't really any way he could have killed them all."

"Huh," said Lip. "I suppose that makes sense. But if he's not responsible for all those people going missing–" he turned and looked at the Doctor "–then who or what actually was?"


	12. Chapter 12

Chris was still screaming as Angles ran through the darkness, held tight with her lungs crushed up against his chest. They were descending into the caves, but through some kind of artificial corridor: the surface under his feet was flat, and easy to run on in the darkness.

"There's so much we didn't tell you kids," Angles was saying, "people say children ask lots of questions, but from where I'm standing you never asked enough! You never even asked why we ate the city! You just assumed it was something us grown-ups would do."

"I know why you ate the city," said Chris, who was an intelligent child. "Sweetness and light, you said. You need one or the other, so you're able to keep going on. Lots of adults don't have much light, where I'm from. So they turn to something else, like drink or reality TV. But you can't have had many things like that here. You only had sugar, and not that much light at all."

As she said the word light, Chris noticed it was no longer dark. There was now a faint glimmer on the corridor walls, which was somehow both multicoloured and brown.

"There was a discovery," said Angles. "An astronomic event. I don't understand the details of it, but this planet… well. It doesn't have long to live. Ipsico 8's come undone from its orbit; it's going to collide with here. It's still a way off; it won't be next week or anything. But it'll happen long before you're as old as me."

"The end of the world," said Chris, who was getting quite used to the idea.

"There's not a lot you can do when you hear a bit of news like that," said Angles. "We asked the other planets if they'd take us in, but you know what they're like with immigrants. So we were trapped, and just all kept going, because none of us knew what else we could do. We said we were doing it for the children, staying strong for them. And who could blame us if we had a little sugar, at the end of a long day pretending things were fine? It's not like the things we were eating would be much use after all of the planet got destroyed."

The ugly light was now bright against the corridor, illuminating the flat floor and walls of jagged rock. Some distance ahead Chris could see the corridor opening out to a cavern, and on the corner of her hearing there blared an awful sound. Angles didn't seem to notice the assault on two of his senses, though: he just kept talking, perhaps as much to himself as to her. He'd bottled up so much, and for so long. It was only now that he had the chance to confess.

"I don't know why we all cracked, in the end. There wasn't any one event that made things get unbearable. Honestly? I think that too many of us had been pressured for too long. I remember sitting there in my office broking some commodities and realising Fin was just sitting there eating her desk, as if that was the most normal thing in the world. Perhaps at one time the rest of us would have shouted at her, but instead we all just laughed; first the boldest ones, then the others, and finally me as well. Why not eat your desk, we said? It wasn't as if anything mattered! Then Crumbs punched out a window and crunched down the shards of glass that were left, and I remember taking a huge bite out of a pencil whose colour I didn't really like. And after that everything's a blur, to be honest. I think someone must have eaten away at our building's foundations, because when I came to I was under this great mound of rubble, and everyone around me was gone."

The awful sound was bellowing now, squalling over the words that Angles was saying. Chris had to concentrate hard to drown out one or the other. But it was hard to tell which was the worse thing to listen to.

"There weren't many of us left after that, the adults or the children. But the kids who had survived were furious at us grown-ups; said we'd made a mess of our chance to be in charge. And most of the other survivors thought they might as well let them; that then they could think that we still had a future. One child survivor in charge of every one of us, except the few of us who refused." He scowled. "Putting adults in care! It's bloody patronising, is what it is."

"You bought a child, though," came a voice from the cavern below. "You've not come alone this time, tiny man?" The voice was at once both low and screeching, seeming to emerge out of the awful sound that bounced against the walls. It wasn't the voice of anything resembling a human, even a robot man built out of sweets. It was like hunger itself had found a voice, and it was very hungry indeed.

"Who is that?" gasped Chris? "What is that?"

"Escape," said Angles simply. They burst into a cavern, which was piled with bones and sound.

Terrified, Chris looked up at the giant monster.


	13. Chapter 13

"I still think it's sick," said Lip. "It's disgusting!"

"Now, Lip," said the Doctor. "All of our legs are held up by some bones. Is that disgusting?" She frowned. "Don't answer that. Anyway, the Kandyman's judged himself enough for doing what he needed to survive. He doesn't need you coming along to do it as well. And I don't need your judgement either, for making sure he can walk again."

Slowly, the Kandyman was making his way from the pile he had been trapped on. He wasn't just made of sweets, of course. His inner circuitry had metallic components; his motherboard was made of something quite like fur. And his legs were now fixed together by a pair of human bones.

"It's just not right," muttered Lip, as the robot thudded to the ground. But the Doctor was no longer listening to anything other than the far wall of the cavern, her ear pressed up against it as the awful sound pulsed through. Tentatively, she gave the rocks of the wall a firm tap with her spoon, watching as ugly light rippled and squirmed away from the place that she had hit.

"This is the light you came through, isn't it?" she said over her shoulder to the Kandyman. "And the sound seems like the voice that coaxed you through, although you might quite know why."

"I'm not going back!" said the Kandyman. "We all fell through there, in fire and in agony. But there's nothing you could do to get me to go back where I'm from."

"Well, I don't want to do that, and if I did it'd still be impossible," said the Doctor. "The tear's only anchored here, to Ipsico 9; where it leads'll be in constant flux. It could go anywhere, now. Not that it matters, if you burn away to your bones just by going through it."

She turned to Lip.

"I've solved your mystery, by the way. A rip like this winds space up like a knot; it won't just seep into this cave. There'll be lots of portals shot through the cavern network, all leading to the same mysterious place."

"So everyone's fine!" said Lip. "They've gone through that hideous thing into whatever's at the other end. There was no monster, and nobody died. We were all just seeing death when nothing bad was there."

The Doctor sighed. "Nice thought, isn't it? But no. There is a monster here— but it isn't the Kandyman, and it isn't made of sweets. In fact, in a way it isn't made of anything at all. 'Cos this rip, it's very intricate, very complicated. And sometimes if things get complicated in the right kind of way, they tend to become–"

She gulped.

"–alive," she said.


	14. Chapter 14

There were gashes in the light, and each of them were mouths. They blared out awful sound through the cramped cavern, which sounded nothing like screaming and yet was exactly that. One of the mouths dropped doorlike before Angles and Chris, its blackness picked out by the tainted and swirling light.

"Come through, small man and smaller child," said the mouth that was also a door, somehow completely static as it formed its words. "Come to wherever I lead, away from this sweet, doomed world." Angles grinned and rushed towards the mouth, as fast as he could over the bones that covered the distance between them.

"Look at the bones," said Chris from the madman's chest. "There's lots, from adults and from children. I don't know what they taught you at your school. But you shouldn't run into a hungry creature's mouth."

"I'll take that chance!" said Angles. "We're dead here anyway; we're all dead! I'm saving you," he said, "and if I were you I'd be damn well grateful, not moaning away like some old woman. This is what a real dream looks like! A real chance for a future, not a silly vision from kids who believe in a man made out of sweets–"

Suddenly, space and time twisted in a direction that wasn't there. Where one cavern had been, there were now two instead. With a crash three figures fell sideways through the air, knocking Angles and Chris to the ground.

"Okay," said the Doctor, "it turned out gravity worked the way you thought it did, Lip. Chris!" she said, noticing the child wriggling out from the adult on the floor. "I told you to stay on the surface away from any possible danger, and you've come to the most dangerous place on the planet instead. Got to be honest; I didn't think my bad influence would set in quite that fast–"

"The Kandyman!" said Chris in horror. "The Kandyman is here! Doctor, he's behind you!"

"What?" said the Doctor. "Oh, I suppose he is. But it's okay. I thought he was a monster, but it turned out he was a person instead. People make that mistake all the time, even me."

"Oh," said Chris. "I thought Angles was a person, but now I think he might be a monster."

"Well, that's a much more depressing mistake," said the Doctor as Angles struggled from the floor. "Or at least, a differently depressing one."

"He was going to take me into that thing's mouth!" said Chris.

"Less of the was," said Angles, now upright again. "We'll be off on our merry way," he snarled, "once this slag's taken out of the picture–"

He lunged at the Doctor, who crooked her elbow in a very particular way. Nonchalantly she caught Angles as his body swung towards her, and watched as he clattered to the ground.

"Slag," she said. "Not been called that before. That's what's exciting, these days. I get so many new insults." She leaned over Angles. "And so many people underestimating me, when they really, really shouldn't." She smiled, and pointed away from the screaming mouths. "Exit's that way. You can still get out, if that's what you want."

Angles laughed a low, crazy laugh.

"Up there? To be ruled by children? Not bloody likely! Tell you what, perhaps it's a good thing I don't have your kid in my grasp anymore. She'd only be wherever I ended up, moaning on about something or other. No, I'll just go myself, whatever the voice might say."

He looked into the void of the nearest mouth, his laugh horrible enough to be clear over the awful sound.

"I'm coming, you hear?" he screamed into the darkness. "Wherever you are! I'm coming! And I'll be damn ecstatic when I'm there, however it turns out to be!"

He ran straight into the gaping mouth— or, at least, he tried to. But he got no further than its very edge before his flesh flashed away into nothing. His skeleton smashed off the edge of the mouth, coming apart to join the bones that were strewn through the cavern.

"Yuck," said two of the mouths. "That had a most unpleasant flavour."

"He needed a child!" gasped Chris. "That's what he said the voice told him. That it had to be both, an adult and a child. But he didn't listen, and now he's a pile of bones."

"Excellent deduction!" said the Doctor. "But also completely wrong. Number of bones in here, I think everyone who came down met with the same fate as your kidnapper. Old Threegobs here only said he needed a child for, ah." She sighed. "For the taste."

"Such an exquisite contrast!" sighed the three mouths in the void. "The naivety of the adult, and the weariness of the child. Both of them longing to escape, and both of them escaping into me…"

"He's like the adults here, isn't he?" said Lip. "Up there in the city, chomping away at the sweets. He can't think of a way to be happy, so he just eats and eats until everything goes away. No matter who it harms."

"They ate sweets, up in the city?" said the Kandyman softly. "So did we, where I was from. To pretend to be happy, or perhaps so we could be happy for a change. It was always so hard to tell the difference. But sweets are all that's left here, aren't they? It's eaten everything but sugar and bones."

"Who'd eat bones?" said the mouths in the void. "That's disgusting! Almost as bad as eating…"

"...Sugar," said the Doctor, her jaw firm. "Funny, isn't it? Planet of sugar and colony of sugar robots, both joined together by you. But it isn't funny! It's very serious indeed. Because you've eaten through everything that isn't sugar, haven't you? Chomping your way through time and space. And I'd bet my socks it's because the kind of thing you are just can't handle its sugar at all."

"What?" said the mouths in a worried sounding way. "No, that's not it at all! I just like to avoid sugar, in case I bulge out too much in the fifth dimension–"

"–come on, Void," said the Doctor, picking up some melted Kandy circuitry. "Eat your sweets."

"But the child said that you're a Doctor!" cried the mouths. "What sort of Doctor tells someone to eat their sweets?!"

"A qualified psychiatrist," said the Doctor grimly, shoving the circuitry into the nearest mouth. The Void howled, and its colours flickered even more sad and beige. The cavern rumbled as time and space twisted round in unusual ways.

"Everyone!" said the Doctor. "Walls! Bits of robot! Actual confectionery! Get anything made of sugar into one of these mouths! This thing's squeezing space like a toothpaste tube; now it's angry it could crush us in a tick."

"I don't know what a toothpaste tube is," said Lip as he cracked a stalagmite from the cavern wall.

"Well, that explains a lot about the teeth here on Ipsico 9," said the Doctor, who'd been trying to be diplomatic. She thrust more robot parts into one mouth as Lip threw bits of the cavern into another, while Chris fed a whole Kandy leg into the third as it gagged and wheezed. The light grew duller and dimmer, and the terrible sound flared to a higher pitch. But space continued to twist around them like a tightening noose.

"Doctor," said the Kandyman.

"No," said the Doctor. "Don't even think it."

"What we're doing isn't enough. Just bits and pieces of sugar, all being thrown in. But if a large amount of sugar were to throw himself in–"

"You're not a large amount of sugar!" shouted the Doctor. "I mean, you are. But you're a person as well, and that's more important. You don't have to sacrifice yourself–"

"–Don't I?" said the Kandyman.

"There'll be a way," said the Doctor. "However surprising, however obscure. There always is, that's what I've tended to find."

"A way to survive," said the Kandyman, uncertainly. "but a way to do good, as well? Maybe that's always been true, for you…"

The light was a colour that shouldn't be seen, and the sound was a noise that should never be heard. All three mouths wore different expressions, but all were somehow ones of triumph. The sugar was damaging the thing in the void; wounding it. But perhaps it wouldn't be enough.

"You said you knew what survival was like," said the Kandyman. "To be reduced to nothing, but to still go on. But you've done so much good, haven't you? Someone down in the factory, they'd heard all about the Doctor. That they were someone who made children happy, and not by threatening to kill them if they weren't. That they'd done it by inspiring them, or saving them with words or deeds. And that seemed like something a candy man should be able to do."

He looked up at the gaping void.

"You do good all the time, Doctor," said the Kandyman. "You're a hero, and you don't always realise when other people aren't. But for me, one chance to be a hero— it's more than I hoped I get. I've spent so long being a monster." He smiled sadly. "And not even a very good one."

He started to run towards the mouth that touched the floor, his legs cracking where the Doctor had fixed together. His face wasn't expressive enough for Chris to know if that caused him pain. But somehow she still knew it did, as he raced towards the void.

"Kandyman!" yelled the Doctor. "Kandyman, please–"

"They were right about one thing, my colony," said the Kandyman. "Happiness will prevail. It's just a question of what you're willing to do, in order to make it happen. Goodbye, Doctor. And thank you."

He thrust himself head first into the mouth, almost jumping towards his end. Like the sweets before him, suddenly he was gone, no trace remaining of the robot who was there just seconds before. But the mouths were retching and roaring in unison, and the horrible sound was turning into a roar. Suddenly there was a brilliant flash, and all three people in the cavern flinched backwards. And then the mouths and sound were gone, and the colours of the portal lay still.


	15. Chapter 15

"Happiness will prevail," muttered the Doctor as they made their way back to the surface. "He took the slogan of his dictatorship and made it an inspiring cry. It's probably best if we all don't think about that too much."

"He saved us," said Lip. "We thought he was hideous and ridiculous, but it's thanks to him we're alive."

"Yes!" said the Doctor. "Let's think about that, instead!" They were coming out of the artificial corridor now, down which Angles had carried Chris not so long ago. As they came out to the surface, the Doctor frowned to herself. Jutting out from the burned sugar wreckage was a small blue thing, that looked as if it had been badly constructed from bits of blue Meccano. The Doctor wasn't sure what it was made out of – although it clearly wasn't sugar – or what its function might have been, beeping away as bits of it strained towards the sky. Silently, she bent down and snapped it from the ground, secreting it away to somewhere about her person.

"I'm done with my spoon," she said to her child companions. "It's told me what I already thought. Space and time are wrong, and I don't know why; everything seems to be somewhere it shouldn't be. It sent the Void mad, at any rate. Sounds like it might've done the same to the people up here. But I know the shape of the wrongness now, I suppose." She smiled at Chris. "I should be able to get you home."

The Doctor turned to the blackness above her, which still somehow illuminated the shattered world. Everything on the surface of Ipsico 9 was a ruin, but she looked sadder than she had since getting there now she looked right up at the sky.

"And there's something else I saw," she said after a while. "The spoon works out what's wrong with time and space, but to do that I need to know the things that are in it. Events. Can't smooth out a tablecloth if you don't know the things that are on it. And far as I can tell there's a very big event, that's in the bit of spacetime this city'll be in soon–"

"Another planet," said Chris, not looking Lip in the face. "Smashing into here. Not today, maybe not for years. But soon. Angles told me. The adults knew."

Lip said a lot of words Chris's grandmother would have disapproved of.

"Just like them!" he said. "Just like them to only let us run things when they knew it didn't really matter! I should have known! We all should have."

"They were trying to protect you, I think," said the Doctor . "In a way that went horribly wrong, like protecting people with lies can do. No hope, no escape. They thought the pretending would be better than the truth, however hard everything got. But when they discovered that there might be some way out— well, some of them risked everything for you. All this–" she waved her hands to indicate everywhere they'd been; the ruins, Lip's town, and the caves "–they did it because they cared. Maybe they made mistakes because of it. But I think the caring is something, in itself."

"Perhaps," said Lip so the Doctor would stop talking. "But the village, everyone that's still alive. We'll have to leave, but is that actually safe?"

The Doctor hesitated. "That thing that ate everyone is gone now. Go into the portal; you'll come out the other side. But as to what you'll find there?" She shook her head. "Portal like that needs oxygen, latches to a biosphere. So you'll have things to eat, and you'll have air to breathe. But whether there are people there, and whether they'll mind more people popping out of a hole made out of time— that's not something I know. And the portal's one way; there's no going back."

"They could come in the TARDIS," said Chris. "Back with us to Manchester. It's a bit rubbish, but it's not that bad."

The Doctor looked truly sad. "The future's still all snarled up," she said. "We've come from the past, so there's no issue there, but take people from here back in time and they might bounce off it completely. That's definitely worse, than whatever's on both sides of that portal."

She sighed more deeply than before.

"A child shouldn't have to make this decision," she said to Lip. "An adult shouldn't! Hell, no age would be old enough, even if you're ancient as me. But the universe we live in, well. Sometimes children have to make terrible choices. And I'm afraid today you're one of them, Lip. I'm sorry."

Lip smiled through his tears. "Happiness will prevail," he said, weakly.

"I certainly hope so," said the Doctor.

"You've given my people a choice, however horrible it is," said Lip at last. "And you found out what happened to my friends, though that was horrible too. Is there anything we can give you, Doctor? And you, Chris. We don't exactly have much, but we owe you such a lot–"

"We don't do what we do to get rich!" said the Doctor. "You don't need to give us anything at all. Adventure's not about payment, but about–"

"Carpets," said Chris.

"Well, I suppose sometimes it's about those," said the Doctor, "but that wasn't really where I was going with–"

"No," said Chris. "We'd like some carpets, as payment for what we've done. Three should be enough, if they're big."

"Well, we can certainly give you carpets!" laughed Lip. "In fact, we salvaged some from the Presidential Palace, made from the finest sugar lace–"

"No," said Chris. "We won't be wanting those. Normal carpets will do just fine."

"I see now that eccentricity's not so fun when you aren't the one who's doing it," muttered the Doctor under her breath.


	16. Chapter 16

"Carpets!" said the Doctor for the eighth time as she propped them against the wall of the TARDIS console room. "It's not what I do, Chris, taking payment for saving the day! I'm not some firefighter out for her salary. I wouldn't like the axe."

"You didn't take payment," said Chris, looking at the trees behind the wall. "I did. I wanted to give you a present, and this was the only way. I don't get a lot of pocket money."

Uneasily, Chris dragged the carpets around the circular room. They were hard to move, but she still just about managed.

"I don't know how you do presents at your school," said the Doctor as Chris laid the first carpet on the concrete floor, "but for most of us it's quite rude to buy someone decorations then go putting them up in their home. I'm an alien, yes, but I still have manners."

"But it isn't you," said Chris. "This room. I like the trees and how you can see the sky, but all the grey bits are very–"

"Anodyne?" said the Doctor.

"I don't know what that means," said Chris. "But they're cold, and unwelcoming. They remind me of the wrong sort of doctor. I thought the carpets would make it a bit nicer here. A bit more like it was yours."

"The wrong sort of Doctor," repeated the Doctor sadly. "Carpets are all well and good," she said after a while, "but I'm worried that they're a bit–" she hesitated "–homey."

"But this is your home."

"Yes, but that's not the point! The point is–" she trailed off, and looked sadly at the floor.

"When we met Lip, he asked where we were from," she said in the end. "And I realised I'd never told you, not because it didn't matter, but because it never came up. People don't go 'I'm a human from Manchester', so I stopped going, 'That's funny, cause I'm…"

"...I'm a Time Lord," she said. "From Gallifrey. And we look and sound a lot like you, so it can be easy to hide the ways that we're not that similar at all. And one of those – the biggest one – is that when we're about to die, we become, well, other people instead. I mean, we're still us! We've the same memories, the same soul. But our entire bodies change, so we look different— and our brains change, so we act quite different too. So this isn't how I've always looked, who I've always been. I've been lots and lots of different people. But this time… is the first time…" She gritted her teeth, and looked incredibly uncomfortable.

"...this is the first time I've been a woman."

"Oh," said Chris. "So you were a man?"

"Lots of men! I was manning around the place for ages. It's funny, the regeneration process. It can get a bit stuck in its ways." "It sounds horrible," said Chris flatly. "Well, being a man wasn't so bad," said the Doctor. "Adam's apples, male privilege. I had all sorts of things going on."

"I didn't mean that!" said Chris. "Although I wouldn't want to be a boy. I mean changing all the things about you, so you look in a mirror and someone else is there. And you used to like chocolate, but suddenly you don't like it any more. It sounds like growing up, only worse."

"It can be very scary," agreed the Doctor.

"I can see that," said Chris. "But I don't see what it has to do with carpets." "Oh!" The Doctor looked uncomfortable again. "Well, before the TARDIS looked like this, with the trees and stuff, it was this big spaceship full of buttons and dials, all blue and purple and whizzy. And spooky. And...and gender's not the same for Time Lords, you have to understand that. We don't have it in the same way they do in Manchester. But it's about how someone like you sees it all, isn't it? A girls, from your world. You can't be a man in an exciting machine then a woman who's all about… carpets."

"You can just tell me if you don't like my present," said Chris. "My mum does that all the time." "But I do like them! They're covered in interesting patterns." "Well, if you like them, you should have them around anyway. Did you like carpets like this when you were a man?" "Most of the time. But there was one man I was who really didn't like them at all," the Doctor said darkly, "who renounced my interest in carpets and–"

"Well," said Chris to stop the Doctor continuing, "then I don't see what the problem is. You can't go around pretending you don't like things just because you're a man or a woman. My Dad is like that. He's always saying that swimming is girly, but really he's the best swimmer I've ever met."

"Perhaps," said the Doctor, sounding very hesitant.

"Anyway," said Chris, "they're a present. From me. So I'd like it if you acted like you wanted them, even if really you didn't. Is that something you were happy to do as all those men?"

"I wouldn't have to act," smiled the woman in front of her. "Whoever I am, whatever I look like. The Doctor's always happy to get a present from a child." She looked around her light grey room. "You're right, Chris. The carpets can stay." "I was meaning to ask," said Chris. "You're always calling yourself 'The Doctor.' But what does that mean, exactly? Doctor Who?" "There's nothing more to it than that. Nothing extra." She grinned. "I'm always just the Doctor. Whoever I end up being."

She clicked her fingers, and above them the sun grew low in the sky. As it did, the light across the console room dimmed, to the thick and orange kind that comes near the end of the day. In this light, the concrete of the room seemed warm rather than cool, and Chris stood on one of the new carpets to hear the sound of unearthly birds. And she looked over to the Doctor, who had been many people, and who now looked as if she was happy.

Sweetness and light, Angles had said— people always needed one when they didn't have the other. Chris had eaten lots of sweets when she'd been sad, just like his people had eaten their city. But she didn't think she'd need to eat any for a while now.

The dusky light shone down through the time machine, and the console roared with a not very natural sound.

"Come on, Chris," smiled the Doctor. "Let's get you home."

The TARDIS made its way back down into broken time.


End file.
